Album Premiere: City Streets Country Roads – …And the World Turned Ever So Slowly (2017)

New Britain folk grunge band City Streets Country Roads have released their long-awaited full length debut …And the World Turned Ever So Slowly on Bandcamp.

A harrowing spiritual journey of existential anguish and acceptance, …And the World Turned expands upon principal songwriter Jason Karwowski’s ghostly folk songs with full fledged rock dynamics and an killer saxophone to boot. Over the course of its eleven tracks, the band does not go gentle into that good night, playing like one’s final indie rock soundtrack on the way from earth to infinity.

Self-recorded in Connecticut but mixed in Omaha at Mike Mogis’ ARC Studios, City Streets shares much of the same aesthetic DNA of its Saddle Creek inspirations (listen hard enough and you will hear THE ugly organ on various tracks). Not only does the album evoke that same emotional intensity and earnest one-liners of that region’s records, but develops its own character in Karwowski’s smoky tenor as he narrates the eulogy of humanity’s mortal battle against the elements in some strange, otherworldly metaphysical realm.

Even though the shadow of death looms heavily throughout the record, there is a spirited embrace of the bonds that tie the living with the departed. Ending with the same “don’t you worry about the world” assurance of its introduction, closing highlight “Thread” comforts leaving the world like going home: “We are the same, friend / sewn of the same thread / sleep well, this too shall end.”